With just a few months until the midterm elections in November, Democrats seem to have the wind at their backs. The averages from the latest national polls show them with a lead of between six and seven points in congressional voting intention.
However, it is important to read the complete data: in many of those same polls, voters still trust Republicans more to handle the economy and immigration. It is, therefore, not an advantage of ideas, but of mood. If the economy were enough to explain the phenomenon, it would suffice to observe growth, employment, or investment. But those indicators alone do not suffice to understand the current political climate. There is something deeper than the numbers: an ancient emotion that reappears time and again when it finds someone to turn it into a political program.
Envy as a Political Engine
Part of the answer is trivial: in the United States, midterm elections almost always punish the president's party. But beneath that mechanism lies a deeper and older current that should be named without euphemisms: envy.
Envy is a universal human feeling. It probably had some evolutionary utility —watching that no one accumulated too much at the expense of the group could have been, at one time, a form of cohesion—. For hundreds of thousands of years, we lived in small groups where envy existed, but where everyone also knew each other. And that mutual knowledge operated as control. The envious person who tried to live at the expense of another —under the excuse that they had less, or less luck, or less ability— was identified: they were put to work or set aside. Thus constrained, envy rarely wreaked havoc.
From the Village to the Corporation
The sociologist Helmut Schoeck, in his classic Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior, precisely showed how every small community developed mechanisms to contain the envious, because without that brake, cooperation becomes impossible.
The problem arises when we move to live in large, anonymous societies. Envy does not disappear; it transforms. In the mass, the resentment of some becomes contagious and turns into collective anger. But now the brake is missing. We do not know those who propagate dogmas fueled by envy, but also by laziness and by the desire to live off the work of others, and for that reason, we cannot identify or constrain them as before. The anonymous envious, well-presented, is no longer set aside: they are invited. And their dogmas, unlike the personal envy of the village, do wreak economic havoc.
When Resentment Becomes Dogma
These dogmas have names. The idea that inequality is the supreme evil —the narrative of Thomas Piketty and Mariana Mazzucato—; the slogan that “only the rich should pay”; the notion that investment and savings should be punished as if they were sins. These are ideas presented with technical and moral garb, but at their root appeal to a much older feeling. The problem arises when politics stops creating wealth and begins to distribute resentments.
Convincing a man that another is the cause of his difficulties is often much easier than helping him to prosper. Envy then ceases to be a human weakness and becomes an instrument of power.
The Preachers of Other People's Equality
It is not coincidental, moreover, that many of their main preachers rarely live according to the rules they propose for others. Bernie Sanders spent decades denouncing “the millionaires” until he himself became one, owning several properties. There is nothing blameworthy in that: a free society should precisely allow anyone to prosper.
The paradox is turning wealth into a moral failing when it belongs to others and into a perfectly legitimate right when it is one's own. An equally illustrative episode from his youth is worth noting: as Kate Daloz recounts in We Are As Gods, in the summer of 1971, Sanders visited the hippie commune of Myrtle Hill in Vermont, and while others were toiling in the fields, he spent the day in “endless political discussion,” until the commune asked him to leave. That small community did exactly what Schoeck describes: they identified the one who talked instead of working and set him aside.
Elizabeth Warren has built her career denouncing economic elites, but her biography tells another story. While she was a professor at Harvard —where she earned nearly $430,000 annually for teaching two courses—, she made almost two million dollars as a consultant for corporations and financial firms, at $675 an hour, including Dow Chemical and the Travelers insurance company: exactly the type of clients she now vilifies from the podium.
Her presidential campaign, built on denouncing “the rich and powerful,” spent $871,000 on private jets in 2019 —the same year she claimed to fly “mostly in commercial class”—, and the video remains for posterity in which, upon descending from one in Iowa and noticing a camera, she tries to hide behind an assistant. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for her part, ended up symbolizing the contradiction by attending the exclusive Met Gala —whose entry exceeds thirty thousand dollars— wearing a dress that proclaimed “Tax the Rich.” The problem is not that they prosper or live well; it would be absurd to reproach them for that.
The problem arises when success ceases to be condemnable if it is one's own, but remains suspicious when it belongs to the neighbor. Envy works much better when those who promote it manage to present themselves not as resentful, but as moral benefactors. Thus, a deeply human feeling acquires the appearance of public virtue and ends up being turned into a political program.
And we should not be deceived by that mechanism. We should be able to see reality as it is, and not through carefully packaged dogmas. Because when one looks at the data, the dogma crumbles. In The Myth of American Inequality, Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund, and John Early show that official statistics grossly exaggerate inequality: the U.S. Census Bureau does not count as income the enormous mass of transfers —food stamps, Medicaid, and Medicare— that low-income households receive, nor does it discount the taxes paid by high-income earners. Correcting for that, the measured gap is reduced to approximately one-fourth of what the narrative proclaims. Much of the “explosive inequality” that fuels indignation is, plain and simple, a statistical artifact.
New York as a Laboratory of Envy Politics
The live laboratory of all this is today New York. In January, Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, took office as mayor, with a program that constitutes almost a catalog of envy politics: rent freezes, free public transportation, universal childcare, all financed by higher taxes on those who invest and produce. It sounds generous. The economy, however, is relentless: freezing rents does not create housing; it makes it scarce; punishing capital does not redistribute it; it drives it away. Argentines do not need to wait for the outcome: they have already run that experiment. The 2020 rent law, enacted to “protect the tenant,” collapsed the supply and skyrocketed prices, until its repeal at the end of 2023 produced exactly the opposite: supply multiplied and real prices fell. New York is about to do what Argentina has just undone. The experiment will tell; but its logic is old and its results in Buenos Aires are still fresh.
The comparison allows for one more turn. While New York embraces envy politics, Argentina chose a president who made praising success a banner: Javier Milei calls entrepreneurs “social benefactors” and “heroes” of progress, and repeats before every audience that growth does not come from redistribution but from those who take risks, invest, and create. The style can be debated; what cannot be denied is the cultural operation: for the first time in decades, someone is trying to reverse the narrative, restoring to merit the moral status that envy had confiscated. It is the exact reverse of the mechanism described by Sowell: if envy disguised itself as virtue, the response begins by removing the disguise.
Calling Things by Their True Name Again
There is a human difficulty here that should be recognized honestly. Following the trend is easy; charting one's own path is dangerous. Evolutionarily, following the group was safer than risking dissent, and that is why fashionable ideas spread so easily. But those who realize this have an obligation: to see reality and call things by their true name, not by how they are perceived or by how it is convenient to call them.
The importance of naming things correctly exceeds economics. In the United Kingdom, for years, the organized exploitation and rape of minors by gangs was softened under the label of “grooming gangs,” a euphemism that concealed systematic violations of girls. Official investigations and uncomfortable voices were needed to call things by their true name again. It is a different terrain from the economic, but the lesson is identical: when language replaces reality, the damage multiplies.
The Democratic advantage in November may be temporary. The emotion that fuels it is not. As long as envy continues to present itself as compassion, redistribution as justice, and resentment as virtue, it will continue to find new spokespeople. The real dispute has never been between the rich and the poor, but between a culture that admires merit and another that is suspicious of it. Understanding that mechanism is essential to defend a free society. And the first step consists, simply, in calling things by their true name again.
